This is for all registered members with access to the forum. (This is everyone who subscribes to Region Services).
Online modeling competitions and challenges will be announced here.

Forum rules
This is for all registered members with access to the forum. (This is everyone who subscribes to Region Services).
Online modeling competitions and challenges will be announced here.
Members must report and document their modeling progress here.
Winners will usually be chosen by one of the following two (or a combination of the two)
-NMRA-BR BOD members
-Via a voting Poll on this forum by the membership.

At the end of each competition, the entries will be moved to the relevant modeling section to facilitate access of the general public.

And the bent finally fixed in place, glued at the top and wedged into the clay at the bottom. In the photo below you can see to the right the original bent made to the old-style design, which is still holding up the track, but due to be removed in due course.

In reply to Dean - too many more! Given that the last ten days of this month I shall be away celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary there's now no realistic prospect of this challenge being anywhere near complete by the time the final hooter sounds. If I'd stuck to the original (unrealistic) design and blithely steamed-ahead it might just have been possible. However, I'm not giving-up - I shall continue this "blog" (shudder) and continue to mark progress until the project is complete (it's a very good spur to action, I find). So watch this space, even beyond the end of March. (Below is the still from the film which I'm using as reference for the above bent and the next, where the footing comes wrapped in some sort of timber caisson. Hours of fun.)

The Challenge is over, but the challenge continues (and so do these up-dates, as promised). There has been quite a long gap in progress, partly down to holiday travels and various other domestic and social pleasures, but also because of a long and imaginative discussion with the “rivet-counters” of EarlyN about the best way to represent (or not) rivet/bolt-heads. Various 3D proposals have developed, but my ultimate decision is to go with a simple “impression” system, using the point of a 0.03mm Pentel pencil to indent and discolour a scale 2” sized dot at each (visible) appropriate point. The thinking behind this goes as follows: the closest any viewer will be able to get to the model trestle once it’s installed in its rightful place will be about 3 feet (480 scale feet) at which distance in the full-sized world the bolt-heads are invisible (see photographs), whereas a modelled 3D bolt-head (however microscopically modelled) would be all too obvious. However, there does need to be a feel of “something there”, which the impression system provides. (There’s also the fact that I couldn’t contemplate drilling the several thousand small holes and tweezering-in the several thousand small 3D objects which the 3D approach would require.)

Meanwhile I had completed constructing the second bent of “authentic” design and installed it to the left of the first such, using the same kind of model-clay technique; but this time with flat vertical surfaces which could then be clad in scale 12 x 12 timbers as per (more or less) the prototype (see reference photo at end of previous entry).

A fiddly job, but not as frustrating as I though it might be. Note that the dimensions for the rear-most set of parts are slightly smaller than those for the front face, because of the curved nature of the trestle. But they are consistent from the top to the bottom of each face, allowing for some handy mass-production. Lots of re-measuring and checking as I went along (and even then some wastage). But now I have my first complete “tower” (two bents and their connections)..!

I have been much struck by the strength and stability of the resultant construction, given the minute-ness of the glued overlaps and the fragility of the component timbers. It says much for the functionality of the prototype design!

This first “tower” has been completed just in time for me to go away with my wife on yet another week’s holiday, so there will be yet another long pause before the next instalment, but I am determined to keep going – and keep reporting. The third “authentic” bent has already been constructed, ready to take the place of the “surgically removed” one.

There has been a further rather prolonged period of non-progress on the model, with social & domestic commitments as usual being to blame, including trips away. However, the third bent has now finally been installed, using much the same techniques as before. Since in this case there is no “ledge” for the footings, the base of the bent was secured in place by applying very small dabs of NoNails underneath the mud-cills, with any spaces around them then being filled with more small blobs of NoNails being dabbed into place on the end of a piece of scrap wood – then painted and worked-up with ground-cover etc.

Lessons learned as I’ve gone along: 1) make the groundwork around the base of the bent good before gluing the cross-braces and girts in place, and 2) there is a pattern to the way each vertical layer of cross-braces alternate their “back” and “front” components. The first photograph below is the (now rather paint-spotted) memory-jogger that I sketched-out to guide me in this process, which I realised only after more haphazardly completing the rear set of cross-bracing on my very first “authentic” tower. Thus the fronts of the two towers now complete are correct, and the incorrectness at the rear of one of them is (I hope) far from noticeable (see final close-up photo).

We are (of course) just about to go off for another weeks’ holiday, with subsequent “catch-up” time which will also be modelling-free, but at least thinking has already started around the fourth bent, which will be to the immediate right of the current group (being the longest of all those yet to make). Main self-debate here is about the form of the footing. Period and more recent photos of the prototype seem to show a simple earth-banking, while the clip from Breakheart Pass (falsely) implies a form of caisson using alternated logs rather than the solid walls of interlaced timbers common higher up. Somewhat also depends upon the (largely accidental) contours of my base landscape at any given point. So it’s good to have time to think.

Much the same procedures and techniques were used as before, but with a few tweaks. The main difference being the modelling of an “interlaced-log” type caisson for this footing rather than one made from solid beams (see the self-discussion in the previous entry). Round-section “12x12” rods were pressed into the modelling clay while it was still soft, and I found that wetting the rods helped them to stick better initially. Once the clay had dried some of the rods were still loose, but it was easy enough then to glue them into place in their self-created grooves. The other changes concerned the modelling of the mud-cills. This time I tried working with just two lengths of “12x12” stuck together side-by-side, it being much easier to chop through this than through the full four-strip width.

But I then added a “projection” to the bottom of each mud-cill once they were in place on the post-bottoms, with the hope that this would allow me to mount the bent into the modelling clay with the cills themselves standing more proud of the finished surface, less “sunk in”.